Planet Arduino

Cheap character LCD displays are more versatile than we give them credit for. Most of the cheapies have a 5×8 character display, which looks blocky but legible when you have an appropriate font. Where it gets fun is that most of the LCD displays also let you upload custom characters.

Taking this to the extreme, [numeric] abused the user-defined characters to write a tiny game of Tetris that would run in the 10×16 frame that you get when you combine four characters together. It’s tiny, it’s monochrome, and doesn’t play the Troika theme (which may be a good thing), but it’s playable. Check out the video below.

[numeric] has bravely put his code for doing this online (ZIP file) as well. It’s rough, to say the least — he did this in a weekend just for fun. But before you go jumping on him for C code in header files, note that this is pretty cool for a quick hack, and also that as good as the Arduino platform is at getting beginners into coding, it doesn’t teach them how to do things right. We wish our first steps into our own coding looked this cool.

This is Hackaday, and we’ve covered a couple Tetris games before. If an LCD display is too high-tech for you, consider Tetris on a DIY LED matrix. If that’s too small, how about Tetris on a skyscraper? Even HP engineers can’t resist the allure of the tiny bricks. And of course, there’s our badge for Hackaday Belgrade. It’s a simple game, and a great test of your skills on a limited system. What’s your favorite Tetris platform?

Cheap character LCD displays are more versatile than we give them credit for. Most of the cheapies have a 5×8 character display, which looks blocky but legible when you have an appropriate font. Where it gets fun is that most of the LCD displays also let you upload custom characters.

Taking this to the extreme, [numeric] abused the user-defined characters to write a tiny game of Tetris that would run in the 10×16 frame that you get when you combine four characters together. It’s tiny, it’s monochrome, and doesn’t play the Troika theme (which may be a good thing), but it’s playable. Check out the video below.

[numeric] has bravely put his code for doing this online (ZIP file) as well. It’s rough, to say the least — he did this in a weekend just for fun. But before you go jumping on him for C code in header files, note that this is pretty cool for a quick hack, and also that as good as the Arduino platform is at getting beginners into coding, it doesn’t teach them how to do things right. We wish our first steps into our own coding looked this cool.

This is Hackaday, and we’ve covered a couple Tetris games before. If an LCD display is too high-tech for you, consider Tetris on a DIY LED matrix. If that’s too small, how about Tetris on a skyscraper? Even HP engineers can’t resist the allure of the tiny bricks. And of course, there’s our badge for Hackaday Belgrade. It’s a simple game, and a great test of your skills on a limited system. What’s your favorite Tetris platform?